I had chose the first, I have a USB-serial converter (UART, Cp2102), on Windows:
Preparation: You will need a usb-serial converter, some program that will support serial communication(I had picked Putty), a program that will help you upload a file via TFTP, and the right firmware.

1. Remove the case of the router.
2. Here you can see the serial port. I plugged the right cables to the right place. From up to down:

I have met the space limitations of my router, so I thought I should extend it.

I have bought an usb pendrive, and I did a little research. Luckily OpenWrt supports space extension of the router. There are many ways of doing that. There is an overlay directory on the router, which can be used for extending the filesystem.

I wanted to extend the storage space of the router so I used my old Kingston pendrive.
That is the point when I want to mention, it is very easy to do. Yet even I got stuck at some point.
Firstly you need some packages,
kmod-usb-core , for the core usb
kmod-usb-uhci or kmod-usb-ohci this depends on what kind of usb driver your router has. There won’t be a problem if you install both.
kmod-usb-storage for the storage drive
kmod-usb2 for usb 2 support
kmod-fs-ext3 | kmod-fs-vfat for the filesystem. I used kmod-fs-vfat my pendrive is formatted to this fs.(more…)

We have an OpenWRT OS on our router, so what should we do now? Of course we want to create our program and run it on the OpenWRT. So Let’s get started.
First we need a developer platform or an SDK. I used my PC with Ubuntu for that.
Second we have to download the SDK that’s suit for us. What kind of SDK we need? It depends on the hardware that we use for running the OpenWRT. I have two OpenWRT compatible router the first is a Linksys WRT54GL, second is a WRT160NL. They have different architecture but that’s not a big problem.
The WRT54GL have Broadcom BCM5352, so I use brcm-2.4 .(more…)

I bought this router cause I wanted to boost our robot building culture with USB port. That was a month ago, now I think it is time to begin the journey.

First I removed the router case, to (lose the warranty and) see whats inside. Its not necessary for the reflash I’m just curious whats inside. The first best thing was, there is serial console with already built spikes, so you dont have to use your engineering skills. So that was the tale, let’s do the real thing.

So I started to read what to do, http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/linksys/wrt160nl it says: You can download 10.03 build called openwrt-ar71xx-wrt160nl-squashfs.bin. The link that appears isn’t good, because this realese is bugged with the router. When you try to reflash the router it stucks at 40% and says the flashing wasn’t succesful. So I asked my friend(google) what to do and here is the link to the solution and the answer I got. So you have to use a latest release of the ar71xx version. Ok that’s done there can’t be any problem.(more…)